Boundless
whimsical creativity defines this Time Magazine Cover proposal. In
1970, famed illustrator/artist Robert Grossman visualized a cover story
idea that dramatized the manifestations of a bad back. Most
dramatically, he depicts a city street narrative where the anatomy of
seven pedestrians is exaggerated to an acutely pronounced degree. In the
foreground, a worker is shown buckling as he carries a chair on his
back that resembles a set of steps. To his left, we see a tortured
couple whose midsections are formed in the shape of corkscrews. A man
whose body resembles a folding chair walks by another man who resembles
an inverted Step Pyramid of Djoser. They all seem miserably in pain,
which is precisely the point of the Time article. With Grossman's
understanding of form and volume, he prefigures the spirit of Antony
Gormley's sculptures in his exaggerated interpretation of the human
body. To be assigned a Time Magazine Cover job was the height of
prestige. Time Magazine could have hired any artist in the world to
create a Time Cover; they chose Grossman because of his punchy, graphic
way to communicate a narrative. The most likely reason this cover did
not run is that Time was a news magazine, and a breaking news story
pushed a "feature story" such as this aside.
Signed lower right.
Framed under plexiglass to a size of 29 x 23 x 1.25 . Airbrush gouache
and brushed gouache on illustration board.

Robert Samuel Grossman (March 1, 1940 – March 15, 2018[1]) was an
American painter, sculptor, filmmaker, comics artist, illustrator and
author. He is a member of The Society of Illustrators' Hall of Fame.

In a career spanning fifty years, Grossman's illustrations have
appeared over 500 times on the covers of various national
publications.[2] TIME, Newsweek, Rolling Stone, Esquire, TV Guide,
Sports Illustrated, The Times, The Nation, The New York Observer, The
Atlantic Monthly, The New Republic, Evergreen Review, New York magazine,
National Lampoon, and The New York Times have all published
illustrations by him. Grossman's work has appeared in children's books,
including The 18th Emergency (text by Betsy C. Byers), and What Could a
Hippopotamus Be? (text by Mike Thaler). He has created album covers for
Columbia, Epic, Warner Bros., and United Artists.
Education and early career

Grossman's father, Joseph Grossman, was a display artist[3] who gave
his son his earliest training. The elder Grossman also sent Robert to
Saturday morning art classes at the Museum of Modern Art, in Manhattan,
NYC. He was Jewish.[4]

Grossman graduated from Midwood High School in 1957. He then attended
Yale University, where he served as a cartoonist, illustrator and
editor of The Yale Record, "America's Oldest College Humor Magazine" (it
predates the Harvard Lampoon by four years),[5] and in 1961 graduated
with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Fine Arts.

A Yale Record parody of The New Yorker (called The Yew Norker)[6] led
to an introduction to art director Jim Geraghty, and an art editor
position at the weekly. During this period, Grossman created "Captain
Melanin," "the world's first African-American superhero," for the
satirical journal Monocle.[7]

In 1963, Grossman began a freelance illustration career.[8] In 1979,
Galerie Vontobel of Zurich, Switzerland showcased Grossman's art in a
solo exhibition.
Best-known work

Grossman created the familiar airplane tied in a knot for the 1980 film comedy AIRPLANE!.

For the 1970 comedy recording Don't Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me the
Pliers, Grossman painted a quartet of caricatures of The Firesign
Theatre.[9] The painting depicts the players as animal / human hybrids,
with the animal portions signifying each member's Zodiacal sign (each
was born under a Fire Sign).

Rolling Stone magazine issued a series of posters featuring
Grossman's cover paintings of George W. Bush, Richard Nixon, Bob Dylan,
The Who, Jerry Garcia, and Crosby Stills and Nash.[10]

Painter

Throughout his career, Grossman employed an airbrush (he favored
compressed air over piston) in order to render the sculptural forms
which are his paintings' most readily identified characteristic. Since
with an airbrush a skilled user may lay in areas of shadow and light
with either crisp or soft edges, the shapes possess a high degree of
visual verisimilitude. Grossman is sometimes credited with spearheading a
resurgence of the tool in illustration; for decades it had been used
primarily for photo retouching. Pete Hamill writing in the international
journal of visual communication Graphis[11][12] and Steven Heller in
Innovators of American Illustration note that Grossman's approach to the
airbrush has been widely imitated. His "mordant wit" is never
duplicated, adds Heller.[13]

On the evolution of technique in his illustration, Grossman said, "I
was impressed by the way David Levine and the Push Pin artists were
using line to develop a bulgy three-dimensional feeling in their work. I
found an old airbrush in my dad's shop and discovered a jiffy way to
outbulge them all. For a while I diligently pursued outline-less-ness as
the secret to a real stereoscopic three-dimensional look. I felt my
line work belonged to a different world that had nothing to do with the
airbrush and went its separate way. Lately I find a strong line
reasserting itself in my pictures."[13]
Sculptor

The understanding of form and volume which informs his
two-dimensional work finds further expression in an ongoing series of
sculptural busts (many of which can be viewed at Grossman's portfolio
website). Unlike most sculpture, they are not intended to be walked
around, but are constructed to be photographed from a single point,
under particular lighting, printed, and shown to a mass audience.[12]
Grossman sculpts these in red modeling clay, then brings a painterly
understanding of color to their multi-hued veneers. Unlike his
paintings, which may take on any subject, the sculptures have been
primarily a medium for Grossman's caricatures.
Filmmaker

Grossman received a 1977 Academy Awards nomination for "Best Animated
Short Film" for Jimmy the C[14] (James Picker, Robert Grossman and
Craig Whitaker, producers; Motionpicker Productions). The three-minute
film features a clay-animated Jimmy Carter singing "Georgia on My Mind".
Ray Charles' rendition of the song is used on the soundtrack.[15]

During the 1980s, Grossman and his brother David produced a number of
animated television commercials under the "Grossman Brothers"
banner.[8] One air-conditioner ad featured a miserable, suddenly melting
pet dog. A pair of singing cupids were the centerpiece of ads for a New
York radio station specializing in love songs. A dancing piggy bank
performed juggling feats for a local bank. Grossman's preferred
technique has been replacement animation, in which separate puppets (or
parts of puppets) are sculpted to represent each increment of action. A
single character might have dozens of different heads, enabling the
expression of any desired word or emotion. The technique was used on The
Nightmare Before Christmas.[16]
Cartoonist

Grossman has written and drawn multipanel comics throughout his
career. The pen and ink strips have appeared in New York magazine, The
Nation, The New Yorker, The New York Observer and elsewhere. Many of
them are written entirely in verse: "The Man Who Bagged Baghdad for Dad"
deals with the current war in Iraq. New York Magazine hosted his
"Waterbugs" cartoons during the unfolding of the Watergate scandal.[17]
It featured Richard M. Nightcrawler, an insect with henchmen named
Haldebug and Ehrlichbug.[18] This grew into the Zoonooz cartoon, which
featured a president prone to bumping his head called Gerald Duck, and a
Mickey-Mouse-stye movie star Ronald Rodent.[19] Rolling Stone hosted
the regular feature ZooNooz, in which animals enacted a satirical
version of current political events.[13][20]

In June 2008, The New York Times published a discussion with Grossman
of his political comic strips, which date back to the Kennedy
administration. The profile appeared concurrently with the launch of
"O-MANLAND,"[21] an online compilation of strips focusing on the 2008
presidential race. The site is named after "O-Man," Barack Obama's
Grossman-invented alter ego, whose superpowers and charisma know no
bounds. The artist collaborated with veteran record producer and
musician John Simon on a theme song for the site.[21] He also made Twump
& Pooty (2017), a webcomic satirizing Donald Trump and Vladimir
Putin.[20]
Author

An occasional essayist, Grossman shared with readers of The Nation
his reflections on Art Spiegelman's now-classic graphic novel Maus:
"[S]oon one is marveling at the amount of fear, hope, love and pathos
that can emerge from a sketch of a mouse's head scarcely a half-inch
high. ... [Spiegelman] promises us a sequel and I, for one, can't wait. I
hope he is scurrying. The most affecting and successful narrative ever
done about the Holocaust." A graphic novel, based on the famous New
York Sun's “Great Moon Hoax,” titled "Life on the Moon", was published
posthumously in May, 2019. The book was nominated for an Eisner Award in
2020.
Personal life
Bio From Wikipedia